ed her that
whatever might be her lot, theirs would continue to be this one of lofty
swinging. So, aware of all that happened they had always watched and
whispered, and only tonight was she resentful in her love for them.
Could they not feel a little sorrow for the woman burdened with trouble
who had come back to the house? Had not the sense of that trouble stolen
through the doors and windows? Beyond the garden walls there was, she
knew, immunity from human pain. The moor understood it and therefore
remained unmoved. It was the winds that grieved, the grey clouds that
mourned and the sunshine that exulted; under all these, and changed only
on the surface, the moor spread itself tranquilly, but the poplars were
different. For Helen, all trees were people in another shape and she
could not remember a time when these had not been her friends, but now
they seemed not to care, and she started up in the sudden suspicion that
nothing cared, that perhaps the great world of earth and sky and
growing things had lives as absorbing and more selfish than her own.

"But only perhaps," she said aloud, asserting her faith in what she
loved.

She pushed the pillow behind her back and stared into the clearing
darkness of Jane's large bare room. The curved front of her elegant
dressing-table with its oval mirror became distinct. Helen's clothes lay
like a patch of moonlight on a chair, the tallboy and the little stool
by which she reached the topmost drawers changed from their semblances
of beasts to sedate and beautiful furniture. By the bedside, soft
slippers waited with an invitation, and into them Helen soon slipped her
feet, for it seemed to her that the trouble thickened with each minute
and that Notya must be in need of help.

Yet, when she had noiselessly opened the door of the room opposite, she
found Mildred Caniper sleeping in her narrow bed with the steadiness of
complete fatigue, with something, too, touchingly childlike in her pose.
She might have been a child who had cried bitterly for hours before she
at last found rest, but Notya's grief, Helen divined, had not the
simplicity which allowed of tears nor the beauty which was Mr.
Pinderwell's consolation. It was not death which had hurt her.

Mildred Caniper's head had slid from the pillow and lay on her
outstretched arm; the other arm, slender and round as youth, was thrown
outside the bed-clothes, and only when Helen bent quite low could she
see the frown of trouble b